This imaginative coupling brings together three fine pieces of Czech church music in skilled and sympathetic interpretations. Dvorák's Mass has received a number of good recorded performances; this one, in the original 1887 version with organ, has a very well-matched quartet of soloists who blend smoothly with each other and with the chamber choir. It's a work of particular intimacy and charm, and these qualities mark this performance.
Janácek's setting of the Lord's Prayer dates from 1906, and is in turn a meditative piece, not without vivid illustrative touches appropriate to a work originally designed to accompany a sequence of devotional pictures; and Petr Eben's Prague Te Deum coincided, in 1969, with a moment of apparent release from political oppression. It has something of Janácek's suddenness in the invention, and a graceful melodic manner. Each of these works is in its way inward, personal and reflective, but they all share a Czech character.